Growing, Older

Barbara Kingsolver credits her with shaping the history and politics of food in the US. Michael Pollan calls her one of his food heroes. Countless others who have vied for a food revolution, pushed organics, and reawakened Americans to growing their own food and eating locally consider her both teacher and muse. Joan Gussow has influenced thousands through her acclaimed book This Organic Life, her lectures, and the simple fact that she lives what she preaches. Now in her eighties, she pauses once more to pass along some wisdom - surprising, inspiring, and controversial. Gussow's memoir begins when she loses her husband of 40 years to cancer and, two weeks later finds herself skipping down the street - much to her alarm. Why wasn't she grieving in all the normal ways? With humour and wit, she explains how she stopped worrying about why she was smiling and went on worrying instead, and as she always has, about the fate of the world around her. Lacking a partner's assistance, Gussow continues the hard labour of growing her own year-round diet. She deals single-handedly with a rising tidal river that regularly drowns her garden, with muskrat interlopers, broken appliances, bodily decay, and river trash - all the while bucking popular notions of how "an elderly widowed woman" ought to behave. Scattered throughout are urgent suggestions about what growing older on a changing planet will call on all of us to do: learn self-reliance and self-restraint, yield graciously if not always happily to necessity, and - since there is no other choice - come to terms with the insistence of the natural world.